Copy link

Information

about

New episodes drop every Saturday. Subscribe anywhere podcasts are found.

Inquiries

Episode Summary

Political scientist Andra Gillespie (Emory University) discusses the significance of black politics in 2020, including the need to fix disproportional representation, ideological sorting in party politics, the experience and salience of racial identity as a grounding factor for black political engagement, pursuing justice through the political process, and bringing political science to bear on lives of faith.

Political scientist Andra Gillespie (Emory University) discusses the significance of black politics in 2020, including the need to fix disproportional representation, ideological sorting in party politics, the experience and salience of racial identity as a grounding factor for black political engagement, pursuing justice through the political process, and bringing political science to bear on lives of faith. Interview by Ryan McAnnally-Linz.

Show Notes

  • Disproportional representation of African-Americans in Congress
  • Ideological Sorting, Partisanship, and Race
  • “Welcome to America’s Freedom Church”: How Rev. Raphael Warnock, the pastor of MLK’s Ebenezer Baptist Church is leading the Georgia U.S. Senate race
  • Pursuing Justice in the Political Process: Voting Rights, Disenfranchisement, and Representation
  • Political rules and doing the right thing
  • Vocation and Christian public engagement
  • The role of faith in ideological sorting, and faith in black politics

Follow Andra Gillespie on Twitter

Learn more about the James Weldon Johnson Institute for the Study of Race and Difference

Keep Exploring

view all
lines, dots, staircase, stairs

May 15, 2023

Tolerating Doubt & Ambiguity

Is your faith a house of cards? If you were wrong about one belief would the whole structure just collapse? If even one injury came to you, one instance of broken trust, would the whole castle fall? If one element was seemingly inconsistent or incompatible—would you burn down the house? This depiction of the psychology of faith is quite fragile. It falls over to even the lightest breath. But what would a flexible faith be? Resilient to even the heaviest gusts of life’s hurricanes. It would adapt and grow as a living, responsive faith. Psychologist Elizabeth Hall joins Evan Rosa to discuss the domains of psychology and theology and what it means for each to “stay in their lane”; she introduces a distinction between implicit and explicit knowledge, and identifies the social- and self-imposed pressure to know everything with certainty; we reflect on the recent trends toward deconversion from faith in light of these pressures; and she offers psychologically grounded guidance for approaching doubt and ambiguity in a secure relational context, seeking to make the unspoken or implicit doubts explicit. Rather than remaining perched upon our individualized, certainty-driven house-of-card faith; she lays out a way to inhabit a flexible, resilient, and relationally grounded faith, tolerant of ambiguity and adaptive and secure amidst all our winds of doubt. This episode was made possible in part by the generous support of Blueprint 1543. For more information, visit Blueprint1543.org.

Elizabeth Hall